About three and a half seconds. That’s how long inspectors currently
have to check a pig carcass for lesions, hair, infected organs, or fecal
matter before it’s sent whirring to workers, who slice up the roughly
250-pound animals in a freezing room, side by side, for eight to 10 hours a day, churning out more than 1,000 pigs an hour.

If a new pork inspection rule recently highlighted
by the Washington Post passes next month, the lines will run even
faster and plant employees will have to take responsibility for this
visual inspection, putting workers and eaters at risk.

Though this might sound like another Trump-era regulatory rollback,
it’s actually the final step in a drawn-out food safety debate that’s
spanned four administrations.

The changes are part of a double-acronym mouthful, the Hazard
Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)-Based Inspection Model
Project (HIMP). These new inspection methods have been quietly piloted
at a select number of pork and poultry plants for some 20 years, with
the basic goal of reducing USDA inspector spot checks and moving more
safety testing offsite. Big meatpackers and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service claim these “modernizations”
will improve safety and address inspector shortages, without harming
workers.

But accounts from workers and investigations by government watchdogs
and advocacy groups tell the opposite story. By speeding up processing
lines and allowing meatpackers to police themselves, HIMP plants pose
serious risks for food safety and increase already hazardous working
conditions.

While the Trump administration faces blowback for giving plant
employees greater oversight of hog slaughter, the Obama administration
passed similar food inspection changes in the poultry industry in 2012,
known as the New Poultry Inspection System.

These changes shift some duties from federal food safety inspectors
to plant employees. Previously, federal inspectors visually checked
every chicken or hog carcass for things like infected organs, fecal
contamination, and other signs of diseases or defects. The new systems
put plant employees in charge of those checks. For pork, large plants
currently must have seven USDA inspectors; under the new rules, they
would have three. For poultry, the number of required USDA inspectors shrunk from four to one.

USDA and industry groups often say that the HIMP pilot programs in both pork and poultry have proven just as, if not more, safe than the current system. But additional accounts suggest otherwise.

A 2013 inspector general report
argued that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the HIMP
pork pilots, and that the agency could not determine whether the pilots
improved food safety. In fact, the inspector general said “HIMP plants
may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”

The advocacy group Food & Water Watch also uncovered
that the new salmonella testing program was flawed for all poultry
plants prior to a protocol change in July 2016, bringing the HIMP
poultry pilot findings into question as well. The group also obtained inspection documents for 14 HIMP pilot poultry plants through a Freedom of Information Act request, and found widespread instances of company employees routinely missing defects.

Politico reported
that several poultry plants enrolled in the new poultry processing
program have already failed necessary food safety testing to increase
their line speeds. Food & Water Watch also revealed
that these poultry plants also “fail the agency’s salmonella
performance standard at a greater rate than those that have not opted
into the new system.” In fact, one of the original poultry pilot
locations operating at faster line speeds was forced to suspend
operations in May due to food safety violations.

When it comes to pork, there are only five HIMP pilot plants, but of
the top 10 pork plants nationwide with the most food safety violations, three participated in HIMP.
This includes the worst performing plant, which racked up nearly 50
percent more citations than the next most dangerous plant over the
course of three years.

More fundamentally, having plant employees check carcasses amounts to
self-regulation and presents a clear conflict of interest. Simply put,
plant owners profit more the less they stop the line, making them more
reluctant to address quality concerns than federal inspectors. In a public comment,
one concerned USDA inspector said, “the bottom line is that a company
is out to make money and they can not do that if the line is not
running. Even if it means letting something go down the line and
ultimately out the back door that is not fit for human consumption.”

“If this proposal goes through and inspectors are cut, I would not feel safe enough to feed [poultry] to my family,” she added.

When a handful of powerful meatpackers ramp up line speeds, the risks
extend beyond food safety to the workers who face the physical toll of
processing more animals in less time.

As it stands, the USDA only assesses line speed increases for food
safety outcomes. The agency is quick to note that it does not have
jurisdiction over worker safety, and that the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) protects workers. But OSHA has been
derelict in its duty to prevent workplace injuries directly tied to
increased line speeds.

While OSHA has set maximum operating speeds in some industries, such
as grain processing, it has not done so for meatpacking. In fact, OSHA
denied a 2013 petition requesting that the agency set slaughterhouse speed standards on the grounds that it did not have the resources to study the issue.

In absence of worker-safety informed limits, line speeds continue to increase. Historically, poultry lines ran at 70 birds per minute.
Today they’re up to 175, after the poultry industry petitioned the
Trump administration to revoke an Obama-era decision to keep the speeds
at 140. The new pork rules would lift processing speed limits entirely,
and the Post reports that line speeds could increase from 18 hogs per
minute to 20. In four independently conducted surveys by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, Nebraska
Appleseed, and Human Rights Watch, workers cited increased line speeds
as the top or most notable complaint in regard to workplace safety.

According to the Department of Labor, meat processors get injured five times more frequently than other workers, and are nearly 20 times more likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. True injury rates are likely even higher: Another study by the Government Accountability Office
found that federal data likely does not capture all meat processing
injuries, especially because immigrants and refugees, who comprise 28 percent of meatpacking workers, are less likely to report injury or workplace misconduct due to fear of retaliation or deportation.
OSHA also admits that workers with limited English proficiency “often
do not get the necessary safety training on the job and do not know
their rights under the OSHA law.”

No matter how you slice it, faster line speeds line meat processors’
pockets at everyone else’s expense. Their costs per animal go down the
faster lines run, churning out more product per worker and per plant.
The one leg meat corporations have left to stand on is the argument that
they’ll pass their savings onto consumers, but recent pricefixing
cases prove those talking points are hogwash. The only real winners are
corporate packers and their shareholders, while workers and eaters pay
the price.